:: RESCHEDULED: The February meeting will take place this Thursday, February 18, 2010 at 6:00PM at Microsoft in Malvern. Pizza and networking at 5:30. Check out the meeting announcement for specifics and to register.

July Meeting

Session 1: Into the Third Dimension - John AngeliniThe first session will start by covering some 3D Basics and move into more advanced 3D concepts like lighting and materials.

Add 3D Content to your application

Set up effective lighting using AmbientLight and DirectionalLight

Learn about Surface Normals and the role they play.

Know the difference between Materials and Textures

Set up a camera to view your 3D Scene.

Use Expression Blend to import .obj files, a long-living standard in 3D Formats.

John Angelini is a Lead Technical Consultant with Perficient, and specializes in SharePoint architecture, development and customization. Mr. Angelini has a lengthy background in commercial graphic design and 3D animation. Additionally Mr. Angelini is the founder of the Philadelphia XAML Developers Group, Philly XAML.org and has done a lot of work with WPF, Silverlight, WCF, WF and other .NET 3.X technologies. He also works with XNA Game Studio creating 3D interactive games and game engines.

Session 2: Silverlight Data Access Methods - Bill WolffThe release of Silverlight 2 makes Rich Internet Applications compelling solution architectures. Most of these projects involve database access through web services. There are several popular methods for web based data access in the Microsoft stack. This talk compares these techniques and provides coding samples to illustrate the value of each. A WCF service accesses SQL Server via LINQ to SQL. The same data is then fed via LINQ to Datasets. The Entity Framework takes a more object oriented view. LINQ to XML provides connectivity to RSS and ATOM. ADO.NET Data Services phrase data calls in REST and JSON syntax. SQL Server Data Services provides cloud based data storage also using REST patterns. The new Microsoft Sync framework is used for caching and offline scenarios. The new RIA Services pattern for Silverlight 3 takes all of this a step further by sharing code logic on the client and server. Basic Silverlight 2 and 3 patterns are demonstrated including asynchronous calls, data binding, property events, and isolated storage.

Bill Wolff is an independent consultant, trainer, and architect specializing in Microsoft development technologies. His company Agility Systems is based in the Philadelphia area. He served as a Solutions Architect in the Microsoft Practice at Unisys Corporation. He ran the consulting firm Wolff Data Systems for 15 years and directed armies of consultants in the dot com world. Bill is founder and President of the philly.net user group, a previous INETA board member where he served as Vice President, Speaker Bureau, and involved in several other user communities. Bill was a contributing author on several books. His certifications include trainer, systems engineer, developer, and Microsoft MVP for VB.NET.